10 June 2015

Liturgical Prayer Is Also the Law of Our Faith

Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. During His mortal
life, He was all of that for us by His immediate action. Since his Ascension,
the Church replaces Him and exercises the same functions of way, truth, and
life. She is the way by means of her Sacraments especially. By Baptism, she
grafts us into the vine, she associates us to His Person as members, she unites
us to Him as Head. The Holy Eucharist accentuates and perfects this union. The
sacramental liturgy presides, under the guard of the Holy Spirit, over this
sacramental action of the Church, and her rites and her ceremonies explain and
interpret the true doctrine on this capital point in a way that is authentic
and adapted to the intelligence of the faithful. This is why the Council of
Trent wishes that pastors explain often these rites to their sheep. She (the
Church) is truth because lex orandi lex credendi: liturgical prayer is also the
law of our faith.

During the Ages of Faith, although the vast majority of the
faithful were uneducated, neither knowing how to read nor possessing books,
they were, nonetheless, much more instructed in the mysteries of our faith, in
the mystery of Christ, than are the men and women of our days. They had
explained to them the prayers and ceremonies of the Mass, the lessons of the
Office; in a word, the Church, our mother herself instructed her children in an
authentic manner. Erunt docibiles Dei (John 6:45; Isaias 54:13).

The liturgy, under the breath of the Holy Ghost, draws from
the Holy Scriptures, the tradition: the symbolism of the Church, a doctrine
that is pure and perfectly adapted to the soul of the faithful. It was in the
liturgy that I learned to know Saint Paul and the Gospels. The liturgical
texts, for example the Masses de tempore, are masterpieces of doctrinal
composition. There the New Testament is explained by the Old, the soul’s
attitudes towards God are indicated in the orations. Little by little the soul
becomes penetrated with these things and finds her mental prayer prepared by
our mother, the Church, as Jacob found the repast prepared by his mother for
his father Isaac.

In the 16th century, under the influence of a certain school
of the Society of Jesus, the prayer of the faithful came to be divorced from
the prayer of the Church. The soul, left alone, withdrawn into herself, sought
the meaning of the Scriptures by reasonings and no longer went to Our Lord
through the Church; from this stems the great difficulty that souls experience
in prayer. To my knowledge, thousands of priests who learned, in seminary, to
practice this laborious and dry mental prayer, abandoned it after their
ordination, to the great detriment of their souls. The liturgy, understood as
the authentic organ by means of which the Church prays and teaches her children
to pray, belongs to the whole Church, and Pius X strongly engaged all the
priests, the bishops, and the religious Orders to cooperate with him in putting
in back into vigour. This was part of his instaurare omnia in Christo,
“restoring all things in Christ”. So well did Saint Teresa understand this that
she said she would give her life for the smallest liturgical rubric. Understood
in this way, it [the liturgy] is not the prerogative or the specialisation of
any given religious Order; it belongs to the Church!

If, by the liturgy, you mean the splendour of the offices,
or liturgical scholarship, then I do believe that the Order of Saint Benedict
is especially called to its study and its exercise, serving, in this way, as a
source and model of liturgical knowledge. The good that I have been able to do
souls — men, women, children, rich, poor, all —in revealing to them the
treasures of spiritual life, of light, of facility in their relations with God
that are contained in the liturgy, demonstrates to me the very great importance
for every priest, parish priest, curate, for all, to work at spreading abroad
this wellspring of spiritual life [that is] so secure and so ecclesial.

A Day That Will Live in Glory

Pray for the Four Cardinals: Burke, Caffarra, Meiser and Brandmuller

“You are the ones who are happy; you who remain within the Church by your Faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from Apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis. No one, ever, will prevail against your Faith, beloved Brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day."